The Weight of Blood

by Laura McHugh

  I was in the kitchen tacking up flypaper when I heard Birdie, our nearest neighbor, warbling hullo! from the road. Birdie had been widowed for twenty years and had a habit of wearing her husband’s old overalls, the legs cuffed to fit her barely five-feet frame. She came by to check on me when Dad was gone, and even though she’d been in this house for my birth, she always hollered from the property line before coming into the yard. It was old-fashioned etiquette, she insisted, that you didn’t step on somebody’s porch without permission unless you wanted to get shot. I’d told her that kind of thing didn’t happen anymore, but she wasn’t one to break old habits.

  I walked out to meet her and patted her coon dog, Merle. Birdie squinted into the late-afternoon sun, her face a web of wrinkles. When the breeze ruffled her thin white hair, pink scalp showed through. “You behaving yourself while the gravedigger’s gone?”

  I held back a smile. Dad worked construction, but Birdie, like a few older folks in town, remembered the Danes as gravediggers and saw Dad as a continuation of the line. While he knew how to bury a body, he was rarely asked to do it. Still, Birdie called him “gravedigger” the same as she’d call someone “doctor,” implying pedigree and respect.

  “I’m doing fine, Birdie, how about you?”

  She held up the burlap sack she was carrying. “I shot a possum getting into the dog food this morning, and when I went to pick it up, wouldn’t you know, it had these darned little babies stuck all over it.” She opened the sack and Merle whined softly, glued to Birdie’s side.

  I peered in. A litter of possums, each about the size of my thumb, crawled over one another. Grown possums are ugly as sin, but the babies in the bag were unbearably cute, with their tiny pink noses and feet and delicate hairless tails.

  “What’re you gonna do with them?” I asked, assuming she’d probably already diced their mother up in a stew. She ate most anything she shot, with the exception of feral cats, which she threw in the burn barrel without any hint of regret.

  “They’re too little to cook,” she said matter-of-factly. “Hardly any meat on ’em. Figured Gabby might want ’em, seeing how she’s got all them animals.” She handed me the sack. “Think you could run ’em over there before dark?”

  Gabby, Bess’s mom, took in every type of stray, man or beast, and couldn’t turn away abandoned babies—me being an example. She and Birdie, along with my uncle Crete, had taken turns keeping me until Dad emerged from his whiskey-soaked grief with the realization that Mom wasn’t coming home.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “When you get back, you’re welcome to come for supper. Spare room’s always ready if you care to stay.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Just depends when I get back, I guess.” I had no intention of sleeping at Birdie’s if I didn’t have to. I used to stay with her all the time when my dad was away on construction jobs, and when he finally agreed to let me stay home alone, it was only so long as Birdie checked in on me. He knew she kept a close watch, shuffling the half-mile to our house periodically to make sure I wasn’t burning the place down or starving to death or whatever else he thought would happen without her supervision.

  “Don’t dawdle, now,” she said.

  We nodded goodbye and I carried the bag through the backyard, pausing to pluck some pennyroyal and rub it on my arms and legs to ward off ticks. A deer path led from the creek up toward the river, where Bess and Gabby lived in a double-wide behind Bell Tavern. The woods I walked through belonged to my dad and uncle. Each had his own chunk, though it was hard to tell where the property split. Grandpa Dane had left the general store to Crete, who was the firstborn and arguably the better businessman. Dad wasn’t bitter about it; he preferred construction work anyhow. And he hadn’t come away empty-handed. He got the house and took over the family vocation of gravedigging, though it was no longer the profitable business it had been in Grandpa’s day. It had diminished to a nearly forgotten craft, like making bentwood chairs or apple dolls, and didn’t take much time away from Dad’s real job.

  Private burial was legal as long as it was done on private property, outside the city limits. Most of Dad’s business came from old folks who lacked the funds for a “city” burial, which was what they called anything involving a funeral parlor. There were others, too: hippies from the commune on Black Fork who’d rather rot in the woods than be embalmed; a preacher from the snake-handling church who hadn’t been worthy enough for God to save from the venom. There were shady circumstances, too, but Dad was known, as Danes have been known for generations, for looking the other way. Sometimes when he was drinking, he’d tell me stories I was not to repeat, of people burned up in meth lab explosions, shot in drug deals, beaten to death by jealous lovers. When he sobered up, he would apologize for scaring me and make me swear he hadn’t told me any names.

  The trees thinned and I could hear the river where it raked over the shallows. “Lucy-lou,” Gabby hollered as I came into view. She was sitting in a lawn chair on the wobbly front deck, with her bare feet propped up on a cooler, her frizzy blond hair bushing around her head like a lion’s mane. She wore a terry-cloth swimsuit cover-up minus the swimsuit. “When you gonna listen and call me for a ride? You know I don’t like you walking those woods alone.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Bess and I had roamed freely before Cheri’s murder, and Gabby had always encouraged it. Please, she’d say. Go disappear for a while. I kept hoping her newfound concern would wear off.

  A joint smoldered between Gabby’s thumb and forefinger. “Goddamn,” she said as I walked up the steps. “You look more like your mama every time I see you. Got your hair halfway to your ass just like her. And you’re finally getting yourself some titties, praise Jesus. I was starting to worry.”

  I’d always been told I looked like my mother, but over the past year, as my hair grew out and I got taller and slightly less awkward, Gabby had compared me to her constantly. It made me happy at first, to know how much I resembled my mom, but lately Gabby seemed troubled by it. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, her face all sorry and sad.

  “I brought you something,” I said. She took a long drag on the joint, burning it up to her fingertips, and stubbed the roach out on her armrest. I opened the sack for her to see.

  “Oh, Lordy!” she said, scooping up one of the possums and cupping it in her palm. “Where’d you get these adorable critters?”

  “Birdie,” I said.

  “I’m surprised she didn’t eat ’em.” Gabby stroked the possum’s silky little tail, and it curled around her finger.

  The screen door squeaked open and Bess joined us on the deck, pulling her home-bleached hair away from her neck and fanning herself. “More strays?” The trailer was already home to an unknown number of cats and a rabbit with a mangled leg.

  “Just look, Bessie,” Gabby said, holding up her finger. The possum hung upside down by its tail.

  “Birdie shot their mom,” I said.

  “Perfect.” Bess rolled her eyes at Gabby. “We know how you love the motherless.”

  Gabby ignored her. “Lucy, I’ve got a nursing mama cat out in the woodpile. I’ll see if she’ll take ’em on. We’ll start with one, ’case she eats it. That happens, we bottle-feed.”

  “You think a cat’ll nurse a possum?” Bess said, examining the roach to see if there was anything worth salvaging. “You’re nuts. That’s a crime against nature.”

  “I’ve seen stranger things,” Gabby said.

  “C’mon, Luce.” Bess slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops. “Let’s go to Bell’s. I’m out of cigarettes.”

  “Forget it,” Gabby said. “Gonna get dark here right quick. I don’t wanna be picking pieces of you out of the river.”

  “We could just as easily get chopped up in daylight.” Bess ran a finger under the edge of her shorts and tugged them down.

  “I said no.” Gabby took the baby possums out of
the bag one by one and draped them on her chest, where they clung to the terry cloth with tiny paws.

  “You weren’t so worried about our safety when you used to lock us in the station wagon and whore yourself out at the Red Fox,” Bess said.

  “If I wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t have locked the doors.” They glared at each other until Gabby stalked off, cradling the possums.

  “Why do you have to bring up stuff like that?” I asked.

  “It just pisses me off,” Bess said. “You know how she had that come-to-Jesus moment after the whole Cheri thing, went back to A.A., started asking where I’m going all the time.” She twisted her hair into a bun and then shook it loose. “It’s annoying. She thinks she’s mother of the year now. I just like to remind her.”

  “She’s still smoking,” I said. “How’s that work with A.A.?”

  Bess laughed. “Pot’s not a drug, it’s her medicine—she says it’s for her anxiety. Like Xanax or something. It’s the only thing that keeps her sane. I’m actually looking forward to working at Wash-n-Tan so I don’t have to spend all summer stuck in the trailer with her.”

  “I wish you were working with me at Dane’s.”

  “Your dad hasn’t even said he’ll let you.”

  “I know, but he will. He doesn’t have any good reason to say no.” For the past two years, he’d told me I was too young for the job, but he could hardly argue now that I was seventeen.

  Bess smirked. “Maybe he’s worried that if you hang around your uncle too much, you’ll wind up like Becky Castle.”

  “Holly’s mom? I don’t even know if Crete’s still seeing her. And she was a wreck before they started dating.” Holly was a few years younger than us, a tiny girl so pale and white-blond that Bess used to call her an albino. The three of us had been in 4-H Club back in grade school and had done a team project together, raising rabbits to show at the fair. Holly’s mom, Becky, was always forgetting to come pick her up after club meetings.

  Bess nodded. “Yeah, but have you seen her lately? She looks like a wrung-out dishrag. She was over at Bell’s one night, dancing by herself in front of the jukebox. Had jizz crusted all down the back of her hair.”

  “How do you know it was jizz?” I asked, laughing.

  Bess shrugged. “Just saying, if your dad thinks I’m a bad influence, I can see where he wouldn’t want you around somebody like her.”

  Crete never bothered to introduce any of his girlfriends to me or Dad, probably because Dad was always telling him that he had terrible taste in women. None of the relationships lasted long enough to get serious anyway.

  “All right, I need to get home,” I said, wadding up the burlap sack that had held the possums. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You know she’ll wanna drive you back.”

  “Tell her you tried to stop me.” I smiled and blew Bess a kiss.

  She pretended to catch the kiss in her palm, then pressed it to her lips, something dumb we’d done since we were babies. “Try not to get dismembered,” she said. Dismembered. The word came easily, like she’d said it a hundred times. It was a newspaper word, one that grew too comfortable with repetition, from countless articles in dozens of papers and broadcasts on the Springfield nightly news. It was easy to think of Cheri as dismembered. It was harder to think of someone leaning on a blade to saw through her joints, to cut muscle, windpipe, bone. It didn’t seem fair to condense what had happened to her into one clean word.

  I took the long way home, crossing onto conservation land to stare into the mouth of Old Scratch Cavern, where dogs had tracked my mother’s scent when she went missing. Old Scratch, of course, was a nickname for the devil. I didn’t go in; narrow tunnels and false floors gave way to an underground river that never saw light. Things lost to the cave stayed lost, and if my mother’s bones rode blind currents in the earth, I’d never find them.

  When I was old enough to hear the story, I thought the worst part of my mother’s disappearance was the uncertainty, not knowing what really became of her. The sheriff was convinced she’d killed herself, but no one could prove she was dead. The search parties Dad pulled together yielded nothing definitive. Bloodhounds followed her scent toward the cave but didn’t find her. The most worrisome part was that my dad’s pistol had disappeared with her, and she’d left with nothing else, but even that didn’t prove anything. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t take the official explanation as gospel; as with anything concerning my mother, there were rumors and stories and whispers of magic. That she haunted Old Scratch and roamed the hills at night. That she’d traded spirits with a crow and flown away, or slipped off with traveling Gypsies. Without evidence of her death, I could continue to believe she was alive somewhere, that for some reason she’d had to leave but would someday come back for me. I begged Gabby and Birdie (and my dad, before he stopped talking about her) for stories, details, any scrap of who she was and what she did. I pieced her together over time, a mosaic of others’ words: witch and ghost, woman and girl, magic and real. I wanted more, but that was all I had.

  When Cheri turned up in the tree, I knew uncertainty wasn’t the worst part. It was a luxury, a gift. The worst part was knowing for sure that your loved one was dead, and I was grateful then that my mother’s body had never been found. The mystery eats away at you, but it leaves a thin rind of hope.

  It was dark already among the trees, fireflies flaring and burning out like flashbulbs, but the path was familiar, and I was more cautious than scared. I’d avoided the woods after Cheri’s murder, just like everyone else, but after a while the fear dulled. I knew the land better than any stranger who might wander through. If I paid attention to my surroundings and kept up my guard, I’d be fine. I wasn’t like Cheri, who’d been vulnerable as a wounded fawn, the easiest kind of prey. No one looking out for her. Not even me.

  When I got home, I fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of tea to take up to my room. I snapped on the bedside lamp, sending shadows scurrying up the lavender walls, and turned on the fan in the window next to my bed. Fresh air flowed into the room and slowly flipped the pages of the notebook I’d left on my pillow. It was a journal of sorts, mostly lists. “Things I Know About My Mother” (almost a full page, including a strand of hair I’d found on an old nightgown of hers and taped in the margin). “Boys I’ve Kissed” (five: four from a spin-the-bottle game at a river party where I got drunk on apple wine, and one a visiting pastor’s son Dad caught leading me—willingly—toward sin on the front porch). “What Happened to Cheri?” Her death hadn’t answered that question, hadn’t narrowed the list of possibilities. She’d run away or she’d been taken, and the last year of her life was a question mark.

  When I wasn’t scrutinizing Cheri’s list, I jotted down notes about places where I wanted to travel. Iowa, of course, to see where my mother had lived, but I wouldn’t stay there long. It wasn’t far enough away. Sometimes I wanted to put so much space between myself and Henbane that it would take days to cover the distance. Dad had never taken me farther than Branson, and he had no interest in going anywhere else, even if we could afford it. He had my life plotted out in three bullet points: get good grades, stay out of trouble, go to college. He hadn’t accomplished any of them himself, but he insisted it was what my mother wanted for me. He’d added a fourth bullet after the incident with the pastor’s son: Don’t let a boy get in the way of numbers one through three.

  Dad couldn’t complain about my grades, which came easily. He said I must have gotten that from Mom’s side of the family. And I hadn’t been in much trouble except the occasional scuffle with Craven Sump, nephew of Joe Bill, who—if you believed the story—had slithered off into the brush, never to be seen again after my mother turned him into a snake. Dad said Joe Bill ran off to avoid paying child support, but Craven and his kin believed in black magic. He called me “witch” or “devil’s spawn” every chance he could, and sometimes
I got tired of it and called him a dumbass or gave him a little shove and he’d report me to the office. The principal would sigh and tell me I had more potential than anyone else in my class, but I needed to work on my charms and graces if I wanted to get somewhere in life. Sometimes I’d glare at Craven, focusing all my energy on a mental picture of snakes clotted in a den, but he remained in his annoying human form. If my mother truly had transformative powers, she hadn’t passed them on to me.

  I sprawled across the bed to eat my sandwich and pulled my paperback copy of Beloved out of the crack between the mattress and footboard, thumbing it open to a photocopied bookmark from Nancy’s Trade-A-Book. Henbane’s tiny library (“library” being an exaggeration—it was just a room in the basement of the courthouse) never had anything good, so I’d made a list for Dad, and whenever he passed through Mountain Home, he’d stop at Nancy’s and see what he could find.

  When I couldn’t keep my eyes open to read any more, I got ready for bed in the pink bathroom across the hall and turned off all the lights. I padded over to the double window opposite my bed, the one that looked out across the backyard and into the hills. We’d learned in science class that stars looked brighter here than in most places because there were no competing lights. Henbane was a dark spot on the globe seen from space.

  Black flakes like falling ash scattered across the moon as bats swirled through the sky. They spilled out of Old Scratch on summer nights and swooped through the valley to feed, their presence as familiar and comforting as the bugs and frogs that sang me to sleep. Dad once spent a month working a construction job in Little Rock, sleeping in a hotel, and when he came home, the nighttime sounds were deafening to his unaccustomed ears. The hotel room had been too quiet at first for him to sleep, but in time he’d gotten used to the absence of night music. I wondered if it would be the same for me when I left Henbane, if all the little pieces of home would so quickly be forgotten.